FNaF 3- mechanic
When you start the game up, you get a message from a skater dude who tells you all about your miserable new job. Basically, the game takes place 30 years after Five Nights at Freddy's 1, when most people have forgotten about the pizza establishment with fucked-up Chuck-E-Cheese wannabe animals. The few people that do remember Freddy Fazbear's Pizza thought it would be a good idea to make a horror attraction based on the urban legend. These people try their best to get the animatronics from the first two games, but they don't manage to find much for their haunted house.1 They do have you, however. As your employer explains it, the attraction will have an actor playing as the security guard, to help spook the patrons. That's where you come in:2 This is not what you get to play, however. Instead, for reasons that are unexplained, your find yourself sitting inside the attraction facilities before your employers actually have enough props to open up. While they fix that, your employer tells you this:3 It's kind of silly, to be honest. There's no real reason you should be there for a whole five nights before the attraction opens. In this way, the game feels more forced than FNAF1 or FNAF2—there's not exactly a good reason to come back to this place so many nights in a row, or to stay from midnight till sunrise. But hey, that's the premise, so we gotta run with it. By the time skater dude is done explaining things to you, the first night is almost over. You don't actually get to mess around with the cameras, or the maintenance panel much. It's on the second night where things get real. On the second night, your employer tells you that they managed to find instructional tapes from the original Freddy Fazbear locations. So for authenticity's sake, he starts playing these tapes for you—and wouldn't you know it, they star phone guy! Phone guy is the man who talks to you every night in Five Nights 1 and 2, before your shift starts—he's the story vessel, essentially. That's sort of his role in FNAF3, as well. He tells you about how, originally, the animatronics doubled as robots AND suits—so people could wear the costumes. But, wearing the suit could be dangerous: if folks weren't careful, the suits could kill them. Because of course they could. Anyway, after he tells you this lore, you have to actually start playing the game. And this is where things get a little messy. The Game Is Confusing Edit After playing for three hours, I'm still not 100% sure how the mechanics work. Here's what I can tell you. There are cameras, like always: Click on a camera, and you can see what's going on in that room. If you click on "map toggle," you'll be taken to a set of cameras that display ventilation shafts instead: Every so often, you'll see an animatronic in a room, like this: 6 If the animatronic is in a normal room, you can click on the "play audio" button, and Balloon Boy's laugh or Hi and Hello sound will play. This will repel the animatronic, should it happen to be standing in the same room you play the sound in. If the animatronic happens to be in a vent, you can shut down that vent, or a nearby vent, to make sure the animatronic doesn't make its way into your room. The longer you do this, the longer you can stave the animatronic off. Or at least, this is how I'm playing—I've seen people theorize that playing audio can also attract/lure the animatronic to its location, or make the animatronic come out of hiding. It doesn't always work for me. Here's the most detailed breakdown of the mechanics that I can find, but there's still some ambiguity. Sometimes, your audio, video, or ventilation can fail. The first two are self-explanatory—without audio, you can't hear when the animatronic is inching its way closer to you. And if your video fails, you can't see where the animatronic is. If your ventilation system fails, then the oxygen in your room gets cut off, and you become prone to seeing jump-scare hallucinations. These hallucinations are the original cast of Five Nights at Freddy's 1 and 2—so even though they're not actually in this game, the developer decided he was going to throw them at you anyway. So the whole "one animatronic" thing? Bunk. They're all here, and, well, it's kind of lame. The good news is that if an old animatronic jumps out at you, they can't actually kill you—they're not real, remember? Not that that helps with the shock of the jump scares or anything. Side note: How exactly are they going to open an attraction in a place where the air runs out all the time? Jesus. In any case, you can reboot the systems, but doing so takes time—which means that you can't monitor the cameras. It's the sort of system that almost seems like a distraction: I'm not sure if I should worry about the hallucinations, or if they're just a way the game distracts me from from the 'real' animatronic. The 'fake' animatronics jump out at me too though, so it's not like I can ignore them, either. But I'm not actually sure how to stop them!910 In effect, the ventilation system means that you experience waaaay more jump scares than the first two games—on any given night, I got at least 2 to 3 jump scares from the original cast. It makes the game more stressful, but it almost feels cheap. In the first two games, you could avoid jump scares if you played well. In three, it seems like you have to resign yourself to having jump scares all the time. Not only that, but after hours of playing the game, I'm not even sure why my character is there, or how he's supposed to deal with the monsters that come after him. The obtuseness of the mechanics doesn't feel like intentional design. Instead, it feels like the developer came up with a bunch of mechanics, like the vent thing, and the audio laugh thing, but didn't actually craft a story that could explain why these things exist, or how the player is supposed to use them. The result is frustrating—I've been stuck on night five for hours now, unsure of how to move forward, or what I'm doing wrong. I know horror is found in the unknown and all that, but playing Five Nights at Freddy's 3 feels stressful in a way that doesn't add to the experience. Don't get me wrong—there are certainly moments of FNAF 3 that are excellent. There is a window in front of your office, for example, where the animatronic will sometimes just...stare at you. Sometimes, it'll run by. And there's nothing you can do about it, except stare helplessly, and then get back to your cameras. There are also moments when a hallucination won't jump at you, and instead will come right up to your face until you shake it off. And out-of-context, I kind of love the idea that you're never really sure what's real and what's not. But there are just so many underexplained systems introduced in this game, that the design now feels bloated.FNAF 3 seems to have too many ideas going on at once. Category:FNaF 3 Mechanics